Method and system for using natural language input to provide customer support

ABSTRACT

A computer implemented data processor system automatically disambiguates a contextual meaning of natural language symbols to enable precise meanings to be stored for later retrieval from a natural language database, so that natural language database design is automatic, to enable flexible and efficient natural language interfaces to computers, household appliances and hand-held devices.

This application is a continuation-in-part of U. S. patent applicationSer. No. 09/085,830 filed May 28, 1998, and claims priority to U.S.Provisional Patent 60/342,360 filed Dec. 27, 2001, each of which arehereby incorporated by reference. Topological methods described in Ser.No. 09/085,830 traverse semantic networks in ways useful forcomputer-implemented natural language processing, including methods forconstraining search to intersections of semantic categories.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

Examples of natural language forms include written and spoken words,gestures and face expressions which clarify the meaning of words,intonation patterns indicating whether a sentence is a question, andother auditory and visual contextual aids for conveying meaning. Each ofthese forms may convey multiple meanings which may appear ambiguous whenforms occur out of context. For instance, there are many dictionarymeanings of the word ‘dash’, such as a race or a small amount ofseasoning. Since multiple meanings for words are so common,lexicographers refer to a single word's diversity of meanings aspolysemy. To disambiguate polysemy, all the of the above naturallanguage forms must be correlated in order to infer the context whichidentified specific meaning from a list of polysemous potentialmeanings.

The prior art detects such inputs on a piecemeal basis, but to provide acomprehensive user interface for computer systems, all of the aboveinputs must be correlated, as efficiently as a person can correlatethem. However, the prior art has failed to correlate even a fraction ofsuch inputs as efficiently as people do. As a result, designers ofnatural language processing systems have greatly restricted the range ofconversation recognized by natural language processing, to increaseaccuracy at the expense of flexibility.

Thus prior art computer systems correlate small ranges of naturallanguage inputs, but the vast majority of inputs that a human couldeasily correlate remain useless to such systems. For instance, a raisedeyebrow can indicate a question and a smile may indicate agreement. anda wave of a hand might indicate dismissal or indicate of a change insubject. All of these gestures are useful and meaningful for people, butthe prior art cannot reliably correlate simple gestures with otherinputs such as spoken or written words.

The inability of computer systems to correlate a wide variety of inputshas hampered the ability of computers to participate in conversationswith people. In particular, this inability to correlate preventscomputers from recognizing important contextual shades of meaning whichare needed for parsing natural language. In human conversation, contextsshift fluidly and dramatically to constrain the meaning of gestures andother symbols which can have varying meanings depending on precisecontext. For instance, the word ‘dash’ can mean at least four differentnouns and three different verbs: dash as in a small quantity mixed intosomething (a dash of salt), dash as in a race(a fifty yard dash), dashas in car dashboard, dash as in a Morse Code (a signal longer that adot), dash as in to mix together, dash as in to ruin something (dashhopes), dash as in to move quickly. For clarity, more meanings for dashmay be needed and added later to a natural language processing system.For instance, dash as in to splatter, or dash as in a short suddenmovement.

Prior art uses grammar or statistics to disambiguate polysemy. Prior artusing a grammar analysis to choose the correct meaning of ‘dash’ basedin grammar can only determine whether a noun or verb meaning is best.Such a system would not disambiguate whether dash means a Morse code ora small quantity of something. Prior art using statistics of usage canonly choose a meaning which was chosen most of the time in a context.Thus statistical methods disable any other meanings and prevent theacquisition of new meanings for a symbol within any context.

Human linguistic abilities are clearly less limited, in addition tobeing more accurate than prior art. Besides acquiring new meanings forwords within a conversational context, humans also create new meaningfulcontexts through self-organizing linguistic abilities. For instance, ashumans converse about subjects, subjects acquire new semantic meaningswhich evolve into new conversational contexts. In contrast, prior artcomputer systems only acquire new semantic contexts through laboriousprogramming and data-entry efforts. The encumbrance of such programmingand data-entry prevents prior art computer systems acquiring semanticknowledge on a real-time basis during natural language conversationswith humans. Although a large number of programming languages have beencreated for inputting semantic knowledge, none of which have theflexibility and general utility of a natural language such as English.Languages such as Prolog, SQL or Lisp cannot match the convenience ofconversing in plain English or other natural languages.

General computer-implemented methods to process natural language havebeen based in either logic, statistics, or topology. Logic has been thedominant method in the prior art. However, logical ambiguities inherentin natural language have foiled the prior art attempts which rely uponlogic as a basis for processing natural language. For instance, one ofthe most important aspects of human conversation is called polysemy: there-use of identical symbols to mean different things, depending uponcontext. For instance, the word run could mean a verb meaning to stepquickly, but it could also mean the verb to campaign for office or tomean the noun for a small brook. In any specific conversation, run wouldsignify just one of these meanings, unless a pun was intended, in whichcase run might signify two such meanings. By sensing natural languagecontexts to determine which polysemous meanings are most within context,humans recognize which meanings are signified.

Context is impractical to define logically because logic requiresenumeration of logical inputs and outputs. The number of contexts whichcan be defined by a natural language input is limited only by everypossible shade of meaning of every symbol which occurs in every possiblenatural language sentence. Since such a large number of combinationscannot be enumerated, logical natural language processors store a subsetto the full set of possible contexts as a logical approximation: Eachnatural language symbol is stored with its own set of logical data, andwith rules for combining its logical data with other symbols.

For instance, when the context is politics, to run would mean tocampaign for office. However, many of these rules will break when acombination of contexts is pertinent. For instance, if the context is apolitical appointee who runs for elected office and also runs agovernment agency, the meaning of run remains logically ambiguous.

The larger the semantic system, the more frequently contextually definedsemantic rules are broken. For vocabularies larger than ten thousandwords the frequency of flaws from broken rules easily overwhelms theaccuracy of a natural language processing system, as demonstrated byproblems in the CYC project. Even when attempting to define a smallstatic semantic dictionary, logical contradictions emerge during testingwhich cannot be resolved without creating a new logical category foreach possible combination of symbols. The combinatorial complexity oflanguage makes testing these categories generally impractical.

For a semantic dictionary of N symbols, in a language where the maximumnumber of symbols strung together is M, the number of logicalcombinations is N to the M power. For a vocabulary of 1,000 wordscombined in short four word sentences, the number of logicalcombinations is 1,000 raised to the fourth power, which equals1,000,000,000,000. If a team lexicographers attempts to define and testa semantic dictionary of this small size there would be 100,000,000,000testing hours required if each test takes 1/10^(th) of an hour. If 500testers each work 2000 hours a year, the team can work 1,000,000 hoursper year, and the testing will be complete in 100 years. By that time,the dictionary will surely be obsolete and require re-testing. Forlonger sentences and larger dictionaries, this drawback quickly growsexponentially worse.

Even worse, as phrases are used within new conversations, theyimmediately acquire new shades of meaning from these new conversations.A natural language processing system must track shifts in overallmeaning of phrases to remain accurate. For instance, the meaning of acelebrity's name shifts as that name is used in major news reports,particularly if their fame is new. To logically represent such shifts inmeaning, the rules describing how to combine a celebrity's name invarious contexts must be extended to handle each new conversational useof the celebrity's name explicitly. Using logical methods, all possiblecombinations of phrases and contexts must be defined and tested.

Because the testing of logical methods is so impractical for largevocabularies, statistical methods have instead been dominant in naturallanguage processing systems, particularly in speech recognition. In theprior art, statistical probability functions have been used to map frominputs to most likely contexts. Statistics, however, only apply to setsof previously occurring events.

All statistics require the collection of a set of prior events fromwhich to calculate a statistical aggregate. For new events no such setexists and no statistical aggregate can be calculated. Unfortunately,natural language is full of new events, such as newly concatenatedphrases, each having a unique contextual shade of meaning. For instance,a person might request “fascinating art—not ugly.” A person would haveno trouble combining the definitions of fascinating, art, not and uglyto make some sense of such a request, even if that person had neverbefore heard the phrase ‘fascinating art—not ugly.’ A statisticalnatural language processing system, on the other hand, would have nostatistical event set from which to disambiguate the meaning of a newcombination of words such as ‘fascinating art—not ugly.’

Another problem with statistics is that once an event set has beencollected to describe the meanings for a symbol, statistical functionsprefer frequently chosen meanings over rarely chosen meanings, renderingthe system insensitive to new meanings conveyed by new events. Thus asstatistical natural language systems acquire semantic knowledge, theirability to distinguish new information diminishes.

The above drawbacks can be avoided by topological methods for processingnatural language.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

The present invention is a computer implemented data processor system toautomatically disambiguate a contextual meaning of natural languageinput streams of symbols, stored as new input stream nodes within asemantic network, whose various candidate meanings are stored as nodesin the semantic network, and whose natural language context is stored asa set of context nodes in the semantic network. By precisely measuringsemantic distances in terms of semantic links when traversing betweenvarious candidate meanings and the set of context nodes, the presentinvention can automatically choose candidate nodes closest to thecontext node set to represent a contextual meaning of the input stream.To store this contextual meaning, the present invention can create newsemantic inheritance links between the input stream nodes and thecandidate nodes closest to the context nodes. These new links createprecise records of contextual meaning to be stored for later retrievalby subsequent natural language queries. The present invention thusenables the semantic network to function as a natural language databaseby storing data as semantic network nodes, with all semantic categoriesneeded for accurate natural language database design automaticallycreated and linked entirely from natural language input streams. Thepresent invention thus automatically provides precise storage andretrieval of detailed, intersecting levels of information, comparable torelational database storage and retrieval capability, without the laborcost and inconvenience of designing a database, to enable flexible andefficient natural language interfaces to computers, household appliancesand hand-held devices. Additional advantages and novel features of theinvention will be set forth in part in the description that follows, andin part will become more apparent to those skilled in the art uponexamination of the following or upon learning by practice of theinvention.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

FIG. 1 shows a natural language processing system deployed on a centralcomputer shared by a variety of customer support staff and remotecustomers connected by Internet connections, in accordance with anembodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 2 shows a natural language processing system deployed on computersconnected by peer-to-peer Internet connections, to provide technicalsupport to customers, in accordance with an embodiment of the presentinvention.

FIG. 3 shows a natural language processing system deployed on acellphone connected to the Internet, to provide a natural language userinterface for dialing, storing and retrieving names, phone numbers frompersonal address book information, in accordance with an embodiment ofthe present invention.

FIG. 4 shows a natural language processing system deployed on amicrowave oven home appliance, to provide a natural language userinterface for operating oven controls, in accordance with an embodimentof the present invention.

FIG. 5 shows a natural language processing system having inputs,storage, and outputs in the form of images, sounds and texts, inaccordance with an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 6 shows a database system having inputs of SQL commands, arelational database processor, and output in the form of images, soundsand texts, in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 7 shows the database system of FIG. 2. with a natural languageprocessor added for converting natural language text input to SQLcommands, in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 8 shows an example of an SQL database processing a querycorresponding to the natural language request “fascinating art notugly,” in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 9 shows a simple image processing method for identifying emotionalcontent of face expressions by analyzing the contours of the mouth, inaccordance with an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 10 show an overview of sound processing methods to identify wordsfrom sounds by analyzing phonemes comprised of transitions from onefrequency bands to another, in accordance with an embodiment of thepresent invention.

FIG. 11 shows a semantic network storing the logical relations of FIG. 8as semantic nodes and links, in accordance with an embodiment of thepresent invention.

FIG. 12 shows a method for combining topological categorization withtopological contextual filtering, in accordance with an embodiment ofthe present invention.

FIG. 13 shows a table mapping from filter types of FIG. 12 to filteractions which screen out input nodes of FIG. 12, in accordance with anembodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 14 shows a table mapping from topological categorization inputcategory types to their corresponding semantic network traversalfunctions, in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 15 shows a table mapping from topological contextual filteringinput context types to their corresponding best contextual distancefunctions, in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 16 shows an example of parsing the natural language text“fascinating art” using the method of FIG. 12, in accordance with anembodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 17 shows an example of parsing “fascinating art not ugly” using themethod of FIG. 12 to filter the output of FIG. 16, in accordance with anembodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 18 shows an example of a method applicable to step 7 of FIG. 16 toassess a visual response, in accordance with an embodiment of thepresent invention.

FIG. 19 shows an example of a method applicable to step 7 of FIG. 17 toassess a visual response, in accordance with an embodiment of thepresent invention.

FIG. 20 shows an example of a method for disambiguating the meaning of“ugly” as defined in the semantic network of FIG. 11 from a combinationof text and image inputs, in accordance with an embodiment of thepresent invention.

FIG. 20 shows an the example of a method in FIG. 20 for disambiguatingthe meaning of “ugly” as defined in the semantic network of FIG. 11,from a different combination of text and image inputs, in accordancewith an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 22 shows a method for combining topological categorization withtopological contextual filtering for connecting phrases to complementaryphrases within a parse tree, in accordance with an embodiment of thepresent invention.

FIG. 23 shows a small semantic network dictionary for storing semanticsrelated to conversations about ordering food in restaurants, inaccordance with an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 24 shows a parse tree created from a sentence “She would like saladand not steak and potatoes, in accordance with an embodiment of thepresent invention.

FIG. 25 shows the method of FIG. 22 used in conjunction with thesemantic network dictionary of FIG. 23 to process the parse tree of FIG.24, in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 26 shows the parse tree of FIG. 24 after processing by the methodof FIG. 22 used in conjunction with the semantic network dictionary ofFIG. 23, in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 27 shows a parse tree created for the sentence “She would likesalad not steak and blue cheese dressing,” in accordance with anembodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 28 shows the parse tree of FIG. 27 after processing by the methodof FIG. 22 used in conjunction with the semantic network dictionary ofFIG. 23, in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 29 shows the method of FIG. 22 used in conjunction with thesemantic network dictionary of FIG. 23 to process the parse tree of FIG.27, in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 30 shows the semantic network dictionary of FIG. 23 afteraugmentation with nodes from the parse tree of FIG. 28, in accordancewith an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 31 shows the method of FIG. 22 used in conjunction with thesemantic network dictionary of FIG. 30 to parse “She would like a lot ofcheese,” in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 32 shows the semantic network dictionary of FIG. 23 afteraugmentation with nodes from a parse tree created by parsing “She wouldlike a lot of,” in accordance with an embodiment of the presentinvention.

FIG. 33 shows the method of FIG. 22 used in conjunction with thesemantic network dictionary of FIG. 32 to disambiguate the meaning of‘cheese,’ in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 34 shows a small semantic network dictionary for storing semanticsrelated to pronouns, in accordance with an embodiment of the presentinvention.

FIG. 35 shows a parse tree created for the sentences “Amy should behere. Harold said her food was ready,” in accordance with an embodimentof the present invention.

FIG. 36 shows the method of FIG. 22 used in conjunction with thesemantic network dictionary of FIG. 34 to disambiguate the meaning of‘her’ in the parse tree of FIG. 35, in accordance with an embodiment ofthe present invention.

FIG. 37 shows a parse tree created for the sentences “Amy should behere. Harold said his food was ready,” in accordance with an embodimentof the present invention.

FIG. 38 shows the method of FIG. 22 used in conjunction with thesemantic network dictionary of FIG. 34 to disambiguate the meaning of‘his’ in the parse tree of FIG. 37, in accordance with an embodiment ofthe present invention.

FIG. 39 shows a small semantic network dictionary for storing semanticsrelated to the transitive relation of ‘bigger than,’ in accordance withan embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 40 shows a variation of the method of FIG. 12, amended tocategorize nodes by spelling and by a complex traversal function, todisambiguate the meaning of “Chicago bigger than a bread box?”, inaccordance with an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 41 shows the method of FIG. 40 used in conjunction with thesemantic network dictionary of FIG. 39 to disambiguate the meaning of‘Chicago’ in “Chicago bigger than a breadbox?”, in accordance with anembodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 42 shows an example of a dialog between a person and naturallanguage processor where the natural language processor remembers andretrieves dialog semantic information, in accordance with an embodimentof the present invention.

FIG. 43 shows an example of a method to create semantic is-a typedictionary links from parse phrase trees containing ‘is’ and ‘a’phrasing, in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 44 shows a small semantic network for storing semantics related topersonal address book information, in accordance with an embodiment ofthe present invention.

FIG. 45 shows the semantic network of FIG. 44 augmented by the firstsentence of the dialog in FIG. 42, after applying step 1 of FIG. 43, inaccordance with an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 46 shows the semantic network of FIG. 45 after applying step 2 ofFIG. 43 to create an is-a link between programmer:2 and Hal:2, inaccordance with an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 47 shows the semantic network of FIG. 46 after applying step 2 a ofFIG. 43 to remove redundant semantic information, in accordance with anembodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 48 shows the semantic network of FIG. 47 after applying step 4after step 3 of FIG. 43 to add semantic information from the second andthird sentences of FIG. 42, in accordance with an embodiment of thepresent invention.

FIG. 49 shows the semantic network of FIG. 48 after applying step 2 ofFIG. 43 to copy the new phrase tree's “good trumpet player” portion tobe inherited by an is-a link by Hal:2, in accordance with an embodimentof the present invention.

FIG. 50 shows the semantic network of FIG. 49 after applying step 2 a ofFIG. 43 to remove redundant semantic information, in accordance with anembodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 51 shows an example of a method to detect and answer a questionencountered in a dialog input phrase tree, in accordance with anembodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 52 shows an example of a table mapping from an input phrase tree'sinput node types to allowable links and traversal starting points ofstep 2 in FIG. 51, in accordance with an embodiment of the presentinvention.

FIG. 53 shows the semantic network of FIG. 50 after adding the inputphrase tree from the question “Who is a good musician friend,” inaccordance with an embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 54 shows the method of FIG. 50 applied to answer the input phrasetree question in FIG. 53, in accordance with an embodiment of thepresent invention.

FIG. 55 shows an example of a dialog in which an answer to question hasbeen answered affirmatively, indicating that the answer would be usefulto store in a semantic network, in accordance with an embodiment of thepresent invention.

FIG. 56 shows an example of a method to stored the confirmed answer to aquestion, using the inversion method of FIG. 43, in accordance with anembodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 57 shows an example of a table of input phrase tree's input nodetypes and corresponding connecting links used to connect interrogativenodes in step 2 of FIG. 56, in accordance with an embodiment of thepresent invention.

FIG. 58 shows the method of FIG. 56 applied to the semantic network ofFIG. 53 to store the confirmed answer to the question “Who is a goodmusician friend,” in accordance with an embodiment of the presentinvention.

FIG. 59 shows the semantic network of FIG. 53 after step 2 of FIG. 56has added a new is-a link between Who:2 and Hal:2, in accordance with anembodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 60 shows the semantic network of FIG. 59 after step 3 of FIG. 56has applied the inversion method of FIG. 43 to invert the input phrasetree for “good musician friend,” in accordance with an embodiment of thepresent invention.

FIG. 61 shows a method for identifying nodes in a candidate node sethaving a minimum average distance between a candidate node and a contextnode set within a semantic network, in accordance with an embodiment ofthe present invention.

FIG. 62 shows a method for identifying nodes in a candidate node sethaving a maximum average distance between a candidate node and a contextnode set within a semantic network, in accordance with an embodiment ofthe present invention.

FIG. 63 shows a method for identifying nodes in a candidate node sethaving a minimum distance between a candidate node and a context nodeset within a semantic network, in accordance with an embodiment of thepresent invention.

FIG. 64 shows a method for identifying nodes in a candidate node sethaving an infinite minimum distance between a candidate node and acontext node set within a semantic network, in accordance with anembodiment of the present invention.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

In accordance with the present invention, topological methodsdisambiguate polysemy by measuring the relative distance between symbolsin a semantic network. In a well constructed semantic network, thedistance between symbols is proportional to the closeness in meaningbetween symbols. Consequently the contextual meaning of a symbol can befound by locating the closest symbol to a set of symbols defining thecontext. Both new symbols and new meanings can be recorded simply byadding new symbol nodes to existing topologies. Shifts in meaning can berecorded simply by shifts in topologies.

However, among others, two problems with topological methods, which haveprevented them from succeeding in prior art, are overcome with thepresent invention. The first problem is that the topological distancebetween a pair of symbol nodes in a semantic network may not reflectcloseness in semantic meaning between the pair of symbol nodes. Thisproblem can be avoided by adjusting automatically adjusting distancebetween each pair of nodes to accurately reflect semantic meaning byregrouping, adding, and removing nodes. Relevant methods forautomatically regrouping, adding and removing nodes are described inpatent application 09/085,830 “topological methods to organize semanticnetwork data flows for conversation applications.”

The second problem with topological methods occurs when representing anddisambiguating the meaning of negation. When seeking a candidate symbolin terms of being NOT some symbol ‘A’, some semantic path will generallyconnect the ‘A’ and candidate symbols. However, closeness of the ‘A’ tocandidate symbols cannot represent closeness to desired meaning. Rather,it represents closeness to opposite meaning. Therefore, when seeking acandidate symbol which is NOT ‘A’, some other metric besides closenessmust be applied to find appropriate candidate symbols.

For instance, a person might request ‘fascinating art’ from aninformation retrieval system. Using topological methods such as themethod of ‘most specific common abstraction’ (Kolodner, pages 346-347),a retrieval system could find nodes closest to ‘fascinating art’ bymeasuring semantic path distances from every candidate node to both‘fascinating’ and ‘art’. The retrieval system would return candidatenodes having minimal distance to both ‘fascinating’ and ‘art’.

For requests containing negation, such a minimal distance function wouldnot suffice. Similarly, requests containing other logical operators like‘or’ as well as prepositions like ‘from’, ‘to’, and ‘after’ demand otherlogical-syntactic meanings beyond the capability of a simple minimaldistance function to model.

For instance, simple distance functions have difficulty interpreting arequest such as ‘fascinating art that is not ugly’ because of thecomplexity of possible negative connections between ‘art’ and ‘ugly’:malicious art, art that is harsh, art that is crude, art made from toxicsubstances. Any of these negative concepts connecting ‘art’ to ‘ugly’might be considered when retrieving meaning corresponding to‘fascinating art that is not ugly’. Yet depending upon context, some ofthese negative concepts might be important and some might be irrelevant.

For instance, if the overall context of a request concernedenvironmental pollution, then art made from toxic substances would be amore important meaning of ‘ugly’ to avoid and others meanings might notmatter. Because of the logical meaning imbedded in the word ‘not’, priorart logical methods have typically defined negative concepts for aparticular context. For instance, prior art has typically contrivedrules such that when the overall context of a request includes‘pollution’ then ‘ugly’ signifies ‘toxic substances’.

In prior art, logical methods employ sets of rules to identify sets ofcandidate nodes preferred for a given logical context, and other sets ofrules to rank the set of candidate nodes for the given logical context.Prior art logical methods have been preferred for their processing speedand economy with storage space. However such advantages have lostrelevance as computer processors has become faster and computer memorybecomes cheaper. As outlined above, logic have cannot handle thecombinatorial complexity of natural language when there are more than athousand symbol nodes. In addition, logic cannot resolve contradictionsin meaning which arise naturally in general-purpose natural languagesystems.

For example, a person might request ‘fascinating art that is not ugly’from an information retrieval system. The system might find, categorizedunder art, a set of candidate nodes. For instance, there might be twosuch nodes. The first semantic node ‘stained glass statues of people’,might inherit from ‘art’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘stained glass’. The secondsemantic node ‘dancers made of children's blocks’ might inherited from‘art’ and ‘strange’. To determine which of the two nodes is mostfascinating and least ugly, a logical semantic processor would applyrules. A first such rule might be that inheritors of ‘beautiful’ are notugly. A second such rule might be that toxic substances are ugly. Since‘stained glass’ might inherit from ‘lead’ which in turn might inheritfrom ‘toxic substance’, the first rule might conflict with the secondrule. To resolve such conflicts, semantic rules must be ranked todetermine which rule about ‘ugly’ is more significant.

In the present invention, the relative distances between nodes are usedin place of logic to resolve logical contradictions. By using sets nodesto define context, contexts can be defined with various degrees offocus. General contexts can be defined by a few high-level nodes, andspecific, narrowly focused contexts can be defined by a large number oflow level nodes. By minimizing distances to a large number of low levelnodes in a narrowly focused context, logical contradictions can beresolved by topology recorded in the local neighborhood of that narrowcontext.

By contrast, in prior art, fuzzy logic algorithms were developed tolocally resolve logical contradictions by using statistical functions.Since some things can be both beautiful and ugly, there is a probabilitythat beautiful implies not ugly, and this is compared to the probabilityof the toxic quality of lead implies ugly. Although statisticalfunctions can resolve logical contradictions between frequentlycompeting candidate nodes, they cannot resolve logical contractions fornew descriptions or old descriptions relative to new semantic nodes,because, as mentioned above, all statistics require a prior set of trialevents upon to base a statistical distribution. If ‘fascinating art thatis not ugly’ was a new request, there would be no events upon which tobase a statistical distribution and statistical methods would be of nouse. Even after recording an event set showing a preference for oneinstance of art over another, there would be no statistical method torelate that event set to a new node was added to the semantic net underthe category of art, for instance a node representing ‘charmingfigurines of edible pasta’.

In large-scale database applications, pure logic is still used toretrieve semantic information, even though logic cannot resolve theinconsistencies which naturally occur in large semantic systems. Thesimplicity of implementing logical operators such as AND, OR and NOT hassupported their popularity when disambiguating simple data, particularlywhen such logical operations are nested in parenthesis to build atree-structure of logical relationships. For instance, a naturallanguage request ‘fascinating art’ can be recast as a logical request‘art AND fascinating’. This request might return candidate rows of datawhich could then be manually winnowed down by new request ‘art ANDfascinating AND (NOT ugly)’ which would return a more focused set ofcandidate rows.

By compounding logical restrictions using relational table joiningoperators, relational databases enable large amounts of data to besearched quickly and efficiently. Although translating requests into theform of logical operators is laborious, and translating data into theform of logically correct statements is even more laborious, if anapplication contains a limited variety of data, the translation can becompleted within a reasonable budget. However, as databases grow tobecome data warehouses, they require considerable manual intervention tomaintain their logical consistency as new data is added. The budget forsuch maintenance can often become unaffordable. For large databases suchas Internet web search engine portals, such maintenance costs run intomillions of dollars.

For convenience and efficiency, it would be better to automaticallystore and retrieve information using natural language, bypassing thelabor needed to translate requests into logical operators, bypassing thelabor needed to translate data into logically correct statements andbypassing the cost of manually maintaining logical consistency. At thesame time, because large natural languages contain paradoxical logicalcontradictions which must be resolved by choosing specific contextualshades of meaning, people need a system for storing criteria by whichcontextual shades of meaning can be disambiguated.

For instance, the adjective ‘attractive’ is commonly attributed to thenoun phrase ‘movie star’. However, some movie stars base their appealupon a kind of fascination with unattractiveness, by playing villainousor anti-heroic roles. In such contexts, the meaning of attractive mighthave to be confined to a star's “ability to attract box-office sales”.To remain accurate in such contexts, a natural language processor mustefficiently store criteria for differentiating between the shades ofmeaning which might be attributed to the word ‘attractive’, even ifthese shades of meaning cannot be immediately mapped to a logicalcontext.

Natural language processing systems must also disambiguate the meaningof requests containing logical prepositions. In such cases, logic mustbe combined with contextual semantic meanings to determine which nounphrase to link to a prepositional phrase. Thus the disambiguation ofmeaning of natural language logical prepositions requires a precisemethod for combining contextual shades of meaning which themselves maynot be logically defined. When servicing natural language requests forspecific information from large databases, it is especially important toaccurately respond to the meaning of such prepositions. For instance,‘and’ and ‘or’ as well as ‘from’, ‘to’, and ‘after’ are importantprepositions used to zero in on specific information. However, themeaning of prepositions vary in subtle ways within natural languagediscourse.

The prior art uses rules and statistics can such prepositions, but onlyafter drastically limiting the scope of input. To handle the fullcomplete meaning of natural language, computer-implemented naturallanguage processors require better methods to disambiguate prepositionalcontextual shades of meaning.

Because of the above difficulties in dealing with prepositionalcontextual shades of meaning, there are a number of commercial uses forsuch improved methods of detecting prepositional contextual shades ofmeaning. For example, database languages which store and retrieveinformation could be bypassed in favor of direct natural language userinterfaces for storing and retrieving information.

For instance, Structured Query Language (SQL) was developed tomanipulate sets of data using compounded formal logic. The success ofSQL attests to the ability of logic to retrieve massive data sets.However, SQL has drawbacks when handling complex data relations. SinceSQL databases require that each data relation be explicitly queried by alogical expression selecting logically validated data, both the queriesand the validated data require considerable expertise to create.Typically, a data base specification and a process for acquiring andvalidating data must be created before actual use of a database. Becauseof the semantic limitations of SQL, both specification and dataacquisition are typically specified by a natural language, such asEnglish. In addition, during the maintenance phase of a database, bugfixes and corrections for bad data are also typically specified in anatural language.

Since natural language typically specifies database implementationefforts throughout the life of a database, database implementation wouldbe cheaper, faster and more accurate if databases used natural languageconstructs to store and retrieve information directly, rather thantranslating natural language specifications into logical data relations.To store and retrieve information natively in English via naturallanguage processing methods would eliminate expenses of translatingEnglish to a database language such as SQL. However, the prior naturallanguage processing methods have lacked the precision of SQL whenretrieving requests containing prepositional meaning. SQL can easilyhandle logical preposition requests by selecting rows from specifictables using constraints on specific values of columns of those rows.The prior natural language processing methods do not have a similarlysuccinct method for responding to the precise prepositional meaning of arequest.

Although natural languages such as English are perfectly capable ofconveying prepositional meaning to the average person, the prior naturallanguage processing methods have not been able to accurately processrequests containing logical prepositions.

Methods for improved detection of contextual and prepositional meaningin natural language processing systems would enable a broad range ofapplications where a user interface on a direct human conversation levelwould be preferred to a menu-based or graphical user interface.

For instance, help desk services handle a large volume of customerrequests. Such requests must often by handled by a human dispatcher fora significant cost on labor, or an automated menu-driven voice-responsesystem which is inexpensive but difficult for customers to interact witha user interface on a direct human conversation level would be preferredto voice-response systems which force customers to navigate a menu tree.

Simple appliances such as washing machines and microwave ovens couldalso benefit from imbedded natural language processors to accept directconversational commands. More complex appliances such as cellphonescould have imbedded natural language systems to complement or evensupplant menu-driven screen displays.

However, none of these desirable natural language processingapplications can succeed without flexible and precise methods fordetecting contextual variations in prepositional meaning.

Topological methods for semantic networks measure distances betweennodes by counting the number of links along paths between nodes. Inorder for these distances to be meaningful, the number of links alongpaths between nodes must correspond to actual closeness of semanticmeanings. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/085830 by Au describesmethods for enforcing such correspondence. Enforcing such correspondenceensures that topological distances are a reliable indicator of closenessof meaning between any two semantic network nodes.

A semantic network representing closeness in meaning as distancesrecords the closeness in meaning for any two nodes in the semanticnetwork. At the same time, each path through the semantic networkrecords a picture of why two nodes are a particular distance. Forinstance, in a small hierarchy of nodes in which retriever, beagle andpuppy inherit from dog, the path from retriever to retriever to beaglehas to two links. If dog in turn inherits directly from mammal, thenretriever, beagle and puppy are each two links away from mammal. Theinheritance links attached to dog are thus in turn inherited byretriever, beagle and puppy, thus automatically recording any closenessin meaning added to dog on behalf of retriever, beagle and puppy. Thistransitivity of closeness in distance models the human ability toquickly associate new information with existing symbolic relationships.For instance, if a new link were to make dog inherit directly from pet,then retriever, beagle and puppy would also inherit from pet, each at adistance of only two links. This redundancy of links in a semanticnetwork provides accuracy when disambiguating meaning.

For instance, the word retriever could be linked to inherit from anothermeaning for retriever which has a more abstract meaning, that ofsomething which fetches an object. A sentence of “A database as a betterretriever of information than a card catalog,” refers to the moreabstract meaning of retriever. On the other hand, the sentence “Mygolden retriever is a puppy,” would refer to the more concrete meaningof retriever which inherits from dog. By using a semantic network tomeasure the average distance to other words in a sentence, the shorterdistance between meanings can be used to disambiguate meaning. Forinstance, for the second sentence, the distance between puppy and theconcrete meaning of retriever is only two links, whereas the abstractmeaning of retriever is three links away. For the second sentence, themore concrete meaning of retriever would thus be chosen. Since asentence is made of multiple words, each word in a sentence relates to aset of paths through a semantic network. By choosing the shortest pathsfrom that set, the multiple words in a sentence can be used as aredundant pointers to the most appropriate meaning of each word in thesentence. This semantic redundancy models the human ability to ignorenoise and grammatical errors in natural language discourse.

Since the number of links along paths between nodes is a positivenumber, distances between nodes are also positive numbers; there are nonegative distances. Some prior art semantic networks contain negationlinks to represent negative connections between ideas. By combiningnegation links with non-negation links, some prior art logical rulesestimate the degree to which nodes are negations of each other, but suchrules are not reliable for general-purpose semantic networks wheredegrees of negation varies by context. There are additional problemswith prior art: many paths will contain two or more negation links. Themeaning of paths containing two or more negation links varies fromcontext to context, and as noted above, natural language contains toomany contexts to model logically.

To accurately store and retrieve negation concepts, the presentinvention stores and retrieves the meaning of negation as the relativeabsence of a close connection. The absence of a close connection iscomputed relative to a contextual set of nodes. Thus the problem of howto consistently represent negation is solved by measuring relativedistances within a context. As described by U.S. patent application Ser.No. 09/085830 by Au, traversal functions for traversing between nodescan be used to constrain search to a requested category. Suchtopological methods can identify a node closest to a particular context,even if that context is a combination of many individual nodes. Forcontexts composed of multiple nodes, the average or minimum distance tothe set of nodes can be used to measure closeness.

The present invention combines topological methods for categorizationwith topological methods for contextual filtering, to disambiguate themeaning of negated symbols, as well as symbols relative to otherprepositions such as ‘and’ and ‘or’. By constraining contextual searchesto specific categories, precise logical relationships implied bysemantic networks can be accurately detected. Thus the precise logicalfunctionality of database languages such as SQL can be provided by thepresent invention while eliminating the cost of maintainingdata-relationships and queries by hand.

With an accurate basis for storing and retrieving semantic networkinformation according to logical prepositions, semantic networks can beused in place of relational databases, to bypass the tedious anderror-prone process of translating natural language data into datarelations. In addition, fine shades of contextual meaning can beautomatically stored for each phrase-context pair without explicitlydefining a relational join for each phrase-context pair.

Another advantage of using a natively natural language database comesfrom the elegance with which new meanings can be stored directly asparse trees of conversational input. Even while parsing a conversationalflow of natural language, new shades of semantic meaning can be stored.Phrases encountered in the beginning of a paragraph can be stored as newshades of meaning which help disambiguate the meaning of phrasesencountered later in a conversation. The present invention also containsmethods to transform meanings encoded as parse trees into standardsemantic inheritance trees, thus automatically updating shades ofmeaning during conversational input with a user.

This ability to update shades of meaning helps greatly when processingexplanatory dialog, defined as texts in which terms are introduced earlyin the dialog and later used as building blocks of meaning later in thedialog.

The present invention improves computer-implemented natural languagesprocessors, so that they can be used as user interfaces to a variety ofcommercial applications. FIG. 1 shows a fully networked support systemfor customer support, in which various supporting activities arecoordinated by a natural language processor in a shared centralcomputer, in accordance with one embodiment of the present invention.

At the top of FIG. 1 is a customer, shown on the left, interfacingthrough a camcorder (or web-cam) to a networked personal computer. Inthis manner, a customer's image and verbal requests can be relayedacross the Internet to a private network, shown at the middle of FIG. 1.Other customers may input verbal request over devices such as thecellphone and telephone shown in FIG. 1.

When requests reach the private network, they could be monitored andhandled by support staff, also equipped with camcorder (or web-cam) toassist customers over a kind of a video-phone connection. Alternatively,requests might be dispatched to the appropriate support staff by anatural language processor, as shown in FIG. 1. Supporting functionswhich may be orchestrated by a natural language processor as shown inFIG. 1 include scanning of archives, stored in micro film and requestingattention from operators of archives (all shown in the lower left ofFIG. 1). Archives may include email messages which can be scanned interms of their natural language meaning, to correlate previous currentrequests with previous requests and responses. For instance, requestsfor explanation of bills may be correlated to billing records and emailsdescribed returned merchandise. Alternatively, requests for newsclippings could be correlated with previous requests for specific kindsof news of interest and requests to ignore other kinds of news. Otherapplications include matching of open job descriptions to resumes andmatching of email messages to topics requested by email listsubscribers, and indexing of email archives by topic. A natural languageprocessor to orchestrate ail of these functions could greatly increasethe efficiency of customer service for the above businesses.

FIG. 2 shows a natural language processing system deployed on computersconnected by peer-to-peer Internet connections, to provide technicalsupport to customers, in accordance with one embodiment of the presentinvention. To bypass automated-support user interfaces such as graphicaluser interfaces and menu-driven interfaces, a conversational naturallanguage interface can be supported by a natural language processor ineach computer, to exchange semantic information across the Internet asshown. To provide audio and visual linguistic input to the naturallanguage processor in the upper computer, a camcorder (or web-cam) isshown. To provide similar audio and linguistic input back to the usershown in the upper half of FIG. 2, a camcorder (or web-cam) is used tostore pre-recorded images and sounds for playback as orchestrated by thenatural language processor in the lower computer. Alternatively, theimages and sounds sent back to the user can be synthesized by either thelower or upper computer as needed. Peer-to-peer natural languagecomputer systems with these configurations could be useful ways tointeractively share and disseminate information that otherwise wouldhave to be interactively disseminated in more labor-intensive lectures,workshops and video-conference sessions.

FIG. 3 shows a natural language processing system deployed on acellphone connected to the Internet, to provide a natural language userinterface for dialing, storing and retrieving names, phone numbers frompersonal address book information, in accordance with one embodiment ofthe present invention. Such a systems would be capable of searching,downloading and uploading information on the Internet, as well asmonitoring the progress of requests to buy, sell, or inquire aboutmerchandise or services on the Internet. Using a natural languageinterface bypasses the difficulty in learning menu-driven and graphicaluser interfaces for such activities.

FIG. 4 shows a natural language processing system deployed on amicrowave oven home appliance, to provide a natural language userinterface for operating oven controls. Using a natural languageinterface bypasses the difficulty in learning menu-driven and graphicaluser interfaces for operating such appliances, as well as provides aconvenient way to report status of operations back to the user. Bylearning new vocabulary from the user, through conversation, anappliance with such a natural language interface can adapt to a style ofconversation convenient for individual users.

The present invention uses natural language reasoning, parsing andpattern matching to process natural language in a natural languageformat. Components of natural language such as images, sound and textare inputs which can be correlated to semantic meanings by the presentinvention. FIG. 4 shows these inputs in the upper part of the figure, inaccordance with one embodiment of the present invention. Using asemantic network to store parsed versions of the inputs, the presentinvention can then retrieve the stored versions of the inputs using usesnatural language reasoning, parsing and pattern matching. FIG. 4 showsthese storage and retrieval operations as the pair of arrows in themiddle of the figure. The confirmation and results of these operationsare produced as output such as images, sound and text. FIG. 4 showsthese inputs in the lower part of the figure.

In contrast, the prior art database systems rely upon logic, queryparsing and relational indexing to process inputs and produce outputs.When operating on data from a broad range of contexts, logic must besupported by numerous structures. These structures include structuredqueries, typically using Structured Query Language (SQL) and databasemaintenance commands, such as ‘create table’, ‘update table’ and ‘createindex’. FIG. 5 shows these structures as inputs in the upper part of thefigure, in accordance with one embodiment of the present invention. Oncethese structured inputs have been received by a data base processor,they are parsed into a query plan structure used to operate upon tablestructures categorizing data into rows and columns of symbols. In orderfor structured queries to succeed, the symbols in these rows and columnsmust be logically ordered. The standard for this logical ordering iscommonly called database normalization, and it requires thatrelationships between data be logically consistent. FIG. 5 shows datarelationships as curved lines labeled as ‘relationship-a’,relationship-b’, relationship-c’. Unfortunately, logical inconsistenciesare so common that most database systems sacrifice the quality oflogical ordering to achieve a reduction in database cost. The magnitudeof this sacrifice is generally larger for larger databases, because therelationships between rows of data create a combinatorial explosion oflogical inconsistencies between data rows.

The present invention bypasses the need for logical consistency byrepresenting data in a semantic network where meaning is recordedredundantly by multiple paths over semantic links connecting semanticnetwork nodes.

The input structures shown in the upper portion of FIG. 5 are alsodifficult to use. They require users to know formal logic andprogramming languages. To make the data in database more accessible tothe general public, natural language processors have been added aspre-processors to database inputs. FIG. 6 shows the database system ofFIG. 5, but showing in the upper left hand corner of FIG. 6 a naturallanguage processor similar to FIG. 4. This architecture allows thegeneral public to access data, but not to maintain the database. Whentables or relationships must be added to the database, suchmodifications must be done by people skilled in formal logic andprogramming languages.

An example of the complex and esoteric structure required by the priorart to process simple natural language requests is shown in FIG. 7. Aprior art system as shown in FIG. 7 might get a request for “fascinatingart not ugly”. Using prior art natural language processing techniques,this simple phrase would translate into the SQL query shown in the upperpart of FIG. 8.

The query comprises three clauses: a ‘select’ clause, a ‘from’ clause,and a ‘where’ clause. The beginning of each clause is shown in bold. Theprocessing order of SQL clauses is ‘from’ clause, then ‘where’ clause,then ‘select’ clause. The ‘from’ clause requests data from two tables,art and artAdjective.

The first line of the ‘where’ clause joins rows from the art table torows in the artAdjective table, finding matching pairs of rows where theartAdjectiveNum column matches the num column. For instance, the firsttwo rows of artAdjective have a num of 10 which matches the first row ofart which also an artAdjectiveNum of 10. Similarly, the third throughsixth rows of artAdjective match the second row of art, and the sevenththrough eleventh rows of artAdjective match the third row of art. Eachof these joined rows is filtered by the second logical requirement inthe ‘where’ clause, specifying that adjective=fascinating. This filtersall but the two of the joined rows, shown in bold in FIG. 8:“20—fascinating (joining) 2-20—delicately charming figures of pasta” and“30—fascinating (joining) 3-30—stained glass statues of people”. Thethird line of the ‘where clause’ filters out rows where artAdjectiveNumis among a proscribed the set of artAdjectiveNum values related to theadjective ‘ugly’. Since the artAdjectiveNum of 30 shown in italics inFIG. 8 is therefore proscribed, that artAdjectiveNum's correspondingjoined row “30—fascinating (joining) 3-30—stained glass statues ofpeople” is filtered out, leaving only the joined row: “20—fascinating(joining) 2-20—delicately charming figures of pasta”.

The ‘select’ clause selects values from two columns from the art table,‘num’ and ‘artDescription’. These are displayed for the joined rowreturned by the query, shown in the bottom of FIG. 8.

Many problems arise from logical representations of semanticrelationships as shown in the prior art of FIG. 8. Since the strength ofa relation between an adjective and a noun varies by context, a separatetable is required for each context. For instance, the meaning of ‘ugly’might be less significant if the context were industrial art instead ofart. Since there are as many different contexts as there arecombinations of nouns, adjectives and verbs, there is no practical wayto represent all the different contexts as logical table structures.Other problems with logical representation arise from subjectivity. Oneperson's opinion relating ‘ugly’ to a noun will vary from anotherperson's opinion. Logic does not easily model differences in subjectiveopinion, because the subjectivity is based mostly on impliedrelationships for which no explicit logical relationship has beendefined.

These problems in logical representations can be bypassed byrepresenting semantic relationships directly in a semantic networkdictionary. FIG. 11 shows a small semantic network dictionary, inaccordance with one embodiment of the present invention, forrepresenting the nouns and adjectives of FIG. 8. By replacing tablerelations with direct links between nodes, the semantic network of FIG.11 succinctly maps adjectives like ‘fascinating’ and ‘ugly’ to nounphrases like “stained glass statues of people.” Since semantic links canbe used to store various relationships such as ‘is-a’, ‘part-of’ and‘because-of’, most semantic networks label the link lines with similarlabels. However, for simplicity, FIG. 11 shows each ‘is-a’ links with athin dark line, and each link of any other type with a fat gray line.Generally ‘is-a’ links are strict categorization links. For instance,‘art’ is a ‘noun’, and ‘desirable’ is an adjective. The gray links areless strict in meaning. For instance, lead is linked to stained glass.Strictly speaking, lead ‘is-a-component-of’ stained glass, along withtint and glass. FIG. 11 does not label each direct link above stainedglass with ‘is-a-component-of’ because of the clutter that would cause.Instead, simple gray lines are used to show that some aspect of lead,tint, and glass informs the nature of stained glass. Similarly, assemantic network can be implemented with just two link types, one forstoring ‘is-a’ links, and the other for storing ‘informs’ links.

To correlate visual and audio input with written input, natural languageprocessor systems often rely upon input processors to map raw input datato specific semantic nodes. FIG. 9 shows a high level overview of aprior art image processor for mapping face expressions to semantic nodessignifying a person's emotions, in accordance with one embodiment of thepresent invention. The mapping takes place in four steps. The first stepabstracts information from the pixels of an image by tracing simplecontours around the mouth. The second step abstracts information fromcontour shapes by measuring the direction and magnitude of theircurvature. The last step abstracts information from contour directionsand magnitudes by mapping from classes of contour directions andmagnitudes to specific semantic nodes of “happy face”, “sad face”,“quizzical face” and “angry face”.

FIG. 10 shows an example of a the prior art sound processor design formapping sounds to words, in accordance with one embodiment of thepresent invention. In step 1, sounds are input as air pressure amplitudefluctuations over time. In step 2, bands of vibration frequencies areidentified from fluctuations in amplitude by a fast Fouriertransformation. Each band is identified as a range of frequenciesdefined in cycles per second also known as Hertz (HZ). The persistenceof each detected band of frequencies is mapped over time by the fastFourier transformation. In step 3, the identification of phonemes isabstracted from specific combinations of frequency bands. For instance,‘sh’ is a broad band of frequencies, whereas the consonants ‘o’ and ‘a’are narrower bands. In step 4, the identification of word nodes isabstracted from sequences of phonemes.

The semantic network of FIG. 11 stores both the semantic image nodesfrom FIG. 9 and semantic word nodes FIG. 10. The semantic network ofFIG. 11 also stores implied logical relationships. These relationshipsare implied by the semantic links. For instance, ‘fascinating’ is linkedvia an inheritor link to “stained glass statues of people”. This storesthe same meaning as the row of artAdjective table “30—fascinating”joined by relation-b to the row of art table “3-30—stained glass statuesof people” in FIG. 8. To retrieve nodes corresponding to logicalrelationships from the semantic network of FIG. 11, the method of FIG.12 combines topological categorization with topological contextualfiltering.

The method of FIG. 12 starts by automatically mapping inputs to specificsemantic nodes in a semantic network, in accordance with one embodimentof the present invention. FIG. 12 step 1 automatically identifies anyexisting semantic nodes which can be which can be mapped to input data,as well as creating new semantic nodes for input which cannot be mappedto existing semantic nodes. After step 1, the semantic nodes identifiedby step 1 are presented to filters which determine what role eachidentified node can play in steps 2 and 3 of the method.’ Filters whichsupply nodes for these roles are shown as ‘traversal type filter’,‘category node filter’, ‘context type filter’, and ‘context nodefilter’. FIG. 13 is a table showing acceptable nodes for each filtertype, at various stages of a natural language conversation, inaccordance with one embodiment of the present invention. For the startof a conversation, FIG. 13 has rows where stage is marked ‘start’. Formid-conversation input, when dialog has already led to some agreement,FIG. 13 has rows where stage is marked ‘middle’. This allows filteringto shift to take advantage of information which emerges about aconversation, as a conversation develops. Alternatively, the transitionfrom start to middle of the conversation can be automatically detectedwhen the context node set grows to an optimal size, typically aboutseven nodes. In other implementations of the present invention, at userrequest, the context node set can be diminished or entirely flushed, totransit the conversational state from middle back to start.

FIG. 13 defines the filters themselves in terms of the semantic networkof FIG. 11. For instance, ‘traversal type filter’ accepts only nodeswhich are traversal types. The semantic network of FIG. 11 shows threenodes which inherit from ‘traversal type’: ‘category hierarchy’,‘general hierarchy’ and ‘list of nodes’. These three nodes would thus bethe only nodes acceptable by the traversal type filter. Similarly, thecategory set filter accepts only nodes which inherit from ‘adjective’ or‘adverb’ in FIG. 11.

Default values are indicated for ‘input traversal type’ and ‘inputcontext type”. In case no nodes pass through the filters to performthese roles, default nodes are substituted. For instance, if no inputtraversal type nodes are found in the input, the default node ‘generalhierarchy’ substitutes for the input traversal type node. Similarly, ifno input context type nodes are found in the input, the default node‘and’ substitutes for the input context type.

So that priority could be given toward filling each specific role, apriority-based dispatching mechanism could be used as an alternative tofiltering. A dispatching mechanism would be more complex to maintain butcould be more accurate. For instance, if the symbols ‘fast run’ wereinput, fast could either be an adverb (fast:1) for the input categoryset or a verb (fast:2) for the context node set. On the other hand, runcould either be an noun (run:2 meaning a small brook or stream) or averb (run:1) both for the context node set. To identify both an inputcategory set and a context node set, fast could be identified withfast:1 and run identified with run:1 or run:2. The dispatcher couldreject the alternative of identifying fast with fast:2 because thiswould prevent identification of an input category set.

To perform step 2 of FIG. 12, both an input traversal type node and aninput category node set must be elicited from step 1. In cases where noinput traversal type node passes the traversal type filter, a defaulttraversal type may be substituted for step 2 instead. For instance, FIG.12 shows a default traversal type of ‘general hierarchy’. In cases whenspecial semantics are involved, other default traversal types may bechosen instead, such as ‘category hierarchy’ when semantics are moreformal.

Step 2 of FIG. 12 automatically collects a set of candidate nodes,traversing from an input category node set according to traversalfunctions described in FIG. 14, in accordance with one embodiment of thepresent invention. For each possible input traversal type, FIG. 14 showsa corresponding traversal function. For instance, the default traversaltype ‘general hierarchy’ corresponds to the traversal function ‘anyinherited links’. The contextual meaning chosen by the overall of FIG.12. is limited to the set of candidate nodes returned by the traversalfunction.

Step 3 of FIG. 12 automatically computes a best contextual distance foreach candidate node, given a context type passed from the context typefilter. The default context type is ‘and’ which in FIG. 15. correspondsto a best contextual candidate function of ‘minimum average distance.’Step 3 uses this best contextual candidate function to choose a subsetfrom the set of candidate nodes returned by step 2.

FIG. 15 is an example of a table of other context types and theircorresponding best contextual distance functions, in accordance with oneembodiment of the present invention. For instance, the input contexttype ‘and’ corresponds to a best contextual distance of ‘minimum averagedistance’. A minimum average distance can be calculated from thetopology of a semantic network, by determining the shortest path, insemantic links, between each candidate node and each context node, thenaveraging those shortest paths and choosing a subset of nodes havingminimum average shortest path length to context. FIG. 61 is a flowchartshowing how minimum average distance can be calculated, in accordancewith one embodiment of the present invention. Step 3 a of FIG. 61 is aloop which iterates through each node of the candidate node set. Foreach pass through that loop, the shortest path from a single candidatenode to each node of the context node set is identified. When theshortest paths to each context node have been identified for thecandidate node, step 3 a calculates the average length of those shortestpaths and stores that average number for the candidate node. Step 3 athen returns to the top of the loop to process the next candidate nodeuntil all candidate nodes have been processed. Step 3 b then determinesthe minimum average shortest path length recorded by Step 3 a over allcandidate nodes, and chooses the subset of candidate nodes having thatminimum average shortest path length to context. By choosing the minimumaverage, the method of FIG. 62 finds the closest nodes to context, inaccordance with one embodiment of the present invention.

Other input context types correspond to other best contextual distancefunctions, according to the meaning of that context type. For instance,the input context type ‘not’ corresponds to a best contextual distanceof ‘maximum average distance’. FIG. 62 is a flowchart showing howmaximum average distance can be calculated. This calculation isidentical to minimum average distance except for the last step. In step3 b of FIG. 62, instead of determining the minimum average shortest pathlength recorded by FIG. 61 step 3 b over all candidate nodes, FIG. 62step 3 b determines the maximum average shortest path distance recordedover all candidate nodes. By choosing the maximum rather than minimumaverage, the method of FIG. 62 finds the farthest nodes from context, tosatisfy requests for symbols which are NOT like the context.

There are other context types which correspond to different bestcontextual distance functions. The context type ‘or’ corresponds to abest contextual distance function of ‘minimum distance’. FIG. 63 is aflowchart showing how minimum distance can be calculated, in accordancewith one embodiment of the present invention. Step 3 a of FIG. 63,records only the shortest path length between a candidate node and ofany node of the context node set, rather than the average shortest pathlength between a candidate node and all nodes of the context node set asis done in step 3 a of FIG. 61 and FIG. 62. By recording the shortestrather than average path length, the method of FIG. 63 emphasizescandidate nodes which are close to some context nodes even if they arevery far from other context node. The result of this emphasis allowsdivergent contextual semantic meanings to be identified. The methods ofFIGS. 61 and 62, in contrast, emphasize convergent semantic meanings, bypenalizing candidate nodes which are far from some context nodes even ifthey are near to other context nodes. In FIG. 63, step 4 a identifiesthe candidate nodes having the shortest path length to any context node.

Other context types require highly stringent best contextual distancefunctions. The context type ‘absolutely not’ is a more stringent thenthe context type ‘not’. Its corresponding best contextual distancefunction ‘infinite minimum distance’ is also more focused. FIG. 64 is aflowchart showing how infinite minimum distance can be calculated, inaccordance with one embodiment of the present invention. Step 3 a ofFIG. 64 determines only if there is any path from a candidate node toany context node, unlike step 3 a of FIG. 62 which determines theshortest path from a candidate node to each context node. Step 4 b ofFIG. 64 chooses only candidate nodes which have no path to any contextnode, unlike step 4 b of FIG. 62 which chooses the candidate nodeshaving maximum average path to context nodes. By choosing only nodeswhich have no path to context, FIG. 64 step 3 thus chooses a subset ofthe nodes chosen by FIG. 62.

Best contextual distance functions can also be made more stringent ormore lenient by different methods of tallying distances along pathsbetween candidate nodes and context nodes. Different types ofinheritance links can be given different weightings when counting thelinks in a path to tally the distance along the path. For instance, inFIG. 15, the input context type ‘and equivalent’ has the best contextualdistance function ‘minimum average distance, not counting is-a links.’This best contextual distance function would be identical to thatoutline by FIG. 61, except that when computing the candidate node'saverage shortest path length, is-a type inheritance links would not becounted, so that they would have no effect on the path length. By notcounting is-a links, all nodes in a is-a inheritance hierarchy areconsidered equivalent to each other in meaning, for the context type‘and equivalent’. Such a distance function would thus measure contextualequivalency of meaning of candidate nodes.

Step 3 and 4 of FIG. 12 can be automatically performed by any of thecontextual distance functions suggested above. After step 4 has returneda subset of candidate nodes tied for best contextual distance, step 5 ofFIG. 12 can generate a summary of that subset for presentation to a userof the computer system. Then in step 6, the user's response to thatpresentation can be acquired, to be assessed in step 7 of FIG. 12. Theassessment can be made using a contextual distance function as outlinedabove by FIG. 61, 62, 63 or 64. The assessment step categorizes which ofthe four possible categories of response the user's response bestmatches: deny, ask, confirm, or complain. FIG. 12 shows branches leadingfrom step 7 for each of these categories of response.

For user responses categorized as ‘deny’ or ‘ask’, the response can beprocessed by passing along with the additional input received in step 6along with the current set of candidate nodes to the beginning ofanother pass through the method of FIG. 12. This branch flows into theline along the left edge of FIG. 12.

For responses categorized as ‘complain’, the response can be processedby passing the additional input received but without the current set ofcandidate nodes. Dropping the current set of candidate nodes, allows theuser to start from scratch without having to deal with parsing problemsof the previous input. This branch also flows into the line along theleft edge of FIG. 12.

For responses categorized as ‘confirm’, the subset of candidate nodesreturned by step 4 can be stored in a semantic network along with theprocessed input. By generating new semantic links to store all of thesenodes in the semantic network, new semantic meanings can be laterretrieved by other input fed to step 1 of FIG. 12. Thus the method ofFIG. 12 enables new semantic meanings to be stored and later retrievedby other natural language input. By storing and retrieving naturallanguage information directly as semantic meanings, the method of FIG.12 can supercede relational databases and other databases by enablinggreater ease of use and better tools for handling of diverse kinds ofdata.

Other categories of response may be needed to handle user responses. Forinstance, rather than responding directly, the user may respond with afurther question. To handle such responses, an additional categoryresponse node ‘digress’ can be added to the ‘response type’ hierarchy ofFIG. 11, and a corresponding branch of action leading from step 7 inFIG. 12.

FIGS. 16 and 17, in accordance with one embodiment of the presentinvention, show the method of FIG. 12 handling specific input datasimilar to the SQL Query shown in FIG. 8. To retrieve records from arelational database corresponding to ‘fascinating art not ugly’, theeight line SQL query at the top of FIG. 8 selects information from twojoined tables, seeking ‘fascinating’ from one table and avoiding ‘ugly’in the other table. FIGS. 16 and 17 show how the method of FIG. 12 canmore elegantly retrieve similar information from a semantic networkcorresponding to ‘fascinating art not ugly’. FIG. 16 shows the retrievalof nodes corresponding to ‘fascinating art’ and FIG. 17 shows now thesenodes can be winnowed down to correspond to ‘not ugly’.

FIGS. 16 and 17 also handle visual inputs of a user's face, to show howimage processing as shown in FIG. 9 can be useful when disambiguatingthe meaning of user input. At the top of FIG. 16, the user input text‘fascinating art’ and a visual input node of ‘quizzical face’ arereceived. In step 1, similarly to FIG. 12, these inputs are passed tofour filters: a traversal type filter, a category filter, a context typefilter, and a context node filter, whose filtering actions are directedby the table in FIG. 13 for the start of a conversation. The traversaltype filter does find any node inputs in FIG. 11 inheriting from thenode ‘traversal type’, so the traversal filter passes on its defaulttraversal node of ‘general hierarchy.’ The category set filter finds thenode ‘fascinating’ in FIG. 11 inheriting from ‘adjective’, allowing‘fascinating’ to pass on as the input category set. The other inputnodes ‘art’ and ‘quizzical face’ do not inherit from ‘adjective’ or‘adverb’ in FIG. 11, so they are not passed on as nodes of the inputcategory set. The context type filter does not find any input nodesinheriting from ‘and’, ‘or’, or ‘not’, so it passes the default contexttype of ‘and’. The context node filter finds two input nodes ‘art’ and‘quizzical face’ which inherit from ‘noun’ in FIG. 11, so it passes themon as an input context node set.

FIG. 16 step 2 receives the input category set ‘fascinating’ and theinput category set ‘general hierarchy’. Step 2 maps ‘general hierarchy’via FIG. 14 to a corresponding traversal function ‘any inherited links’.Step 2 uses this traversal function to traverse from the node‘fascinating’ in FIG. 11 downward to each inheritor of ‘fascinating’:‘charming’, ‘delicate figurines of pasta’ and ‘stained glass statues ofpeople.’ These three nodes are then collected into the set of candidatenodes passed to step 3.

FIG. 16 step 3 loops through the set of three candidate nodes, computingfor each candidate node a best contextual distance to the input contextnode set. Step 3 uses the table of FIG. 15 and the context type passedinto step 3 of ‘and’ to determine that the best contextual distancefunction is ‘minimum average distance’. FIG. 61 shows the steps inapplying the minimum average distance function. FIG. 16 step 3 showsresults of applying FIG. 61 step 3 a to the semantic network of FIG. 11.From the candidate node ‘charming’, the shortest path to ‘art’ has 2links: from ‘art’ to ‘delicate figurines of pasta’ to ‘charming’. Fromthe candidate node ‘charming’ to the other context node ‘quizzical face’the shortest path has 6 links. Thus the average shortest path from‘charming’ to the two context nodes is (2+6)/2=8/2=4 links. In contrast,two other candidate nodes have shorter average shortest paths. Theshortest path from ‘delicate figurines of pasta’ is just one link longto ‘art’. The shortest path from ‘delicate figurines of pasta’ to‘quizzical face’ is six links long. So the average shortest path from‘delicate figurines of pasta’ to the two context nodes ‘art’ and‘quizzical face’ is (1+6)/2=7/2=3.5 links. Similarly, the averageshortest path from ‘stained glass statues of people’ to the two contextnodes ‘art’ and ‘quizzical face’ is also 3.5 links. These shortest pathsare outline in step 3 of FIG. 16.

In step 4 of FIG. 16, a subset of the candidate nodes are chosen havingbest contextual distance. Since candidate nodes ‘delicate figurines ofpasta’ and ‘stained glass statues of people’ have the minimal averagedistance, as described by FIG. 15 for the input context type ‘and’, theyare chosen, eliminating the candidate node ‘charming’. Elimination ofthe candidate node ‘charming’ results from the relatively distantposition of ‘charming’ from ‘art’ in the semantic network of FIG. 11.From a linguistic point of view, this corresponds to the notion that artis less directly connected to the adjective charming than it is tospecific instances of art. In larger semantic networks, structuredaccording to methods outline by was described in patent application Ser.No. 09/085830 by Au, ‘art’ may head a larger subtree, increasing thedistance from ‘art’ to various instances of art, but the distancebetween ‘art’ and the adjective ‘charming’ would also increase,remaining greater.

In step 5 of FIG. 16, the subset of candidate nodes chosen in step 4 aredescribed as two nodes texts connected by ‘or’ for presentation to auser. Other presentations to the user may also be useful, such as asimple scrolling list or a list integrated into a graphical userinterface relating parsed user input items to list elements.

Step 6 of both FIG. 12 and FIG. 16 gathers from the user a response tothe presentation of step 4. The purpose of gathering a response is tovalidate that the candidate nodes displayed by step 5 are desired. Step6 of FIG. 16 shows an example of a response, which includes the text‘not ugly’ and the visual input node of ‘unhappy face’. This response isassessed in terms of its input nodes in step 7 by a method outlined inFIG. 18.

The method in FIG. 18, in accordance with one embodiment of the presentinvention, is a variation on the topological classification of an inputresponse shown in FIG. 12. The method of FIG. 18 begins with of a set ofresponse nodes in step 7 a, and, by determining which response type nodemost closely corresponds to the set of input nodes. The method of FIG.18 begins by checking for polysemy in the input text. Polysemy can bedetected as an input word or input phrase which can be associated withtwo or more nodes of the same spelling in a semantic network. Forinstance, the word ugly in the input text of step 6 FIG. 16 can beassociated with two nodes both spelled ‘ugly’ in FIG. 11: ugly:1 andugly:2. By measuring distances in the semantic network to find the setof nodes with best contextual distance, Step 7 c of FIG. 18disambiguates which of these two nodes is most meaningful in the contextof the input. Step 7 d returns this set of most meaningful nodes. Step 7e returns to FIG. 12 to perform actions such as storing summaries ofcandidate nodes of FIG. 12 or dropping the current set of candidatenodes. FIG. 19, in accordance with one embodiment of the presentinvention, shows an the method of FIG. 18 with a different set of inputshaving no text, only an image of a happy face. Since there is nopolysemy detected, semantic distances are only compared betweencandidate nodes and the context node “happy face”.

FIG. 20, in accordance with one embodiment of the present invention,shows details of step 7 a of FIGS. 18 and 19. Similarly to the method ofFIG. 12, pre-processors map inputs to nodes and pass these nodes tocategory set, context type, and context node filters. After filtering,candidate nodes are chosen by which node has the best contextualdistance, to disambiguate polysemy by reducing the set of candidatenodes to the subset having best contextual distance. FIG. 20 shows howan input of a happy face maps to a best contextual distance for thecandidate node ‘ugly:2’ which is ugly in the sense of desirable, scaryand entertaining. In contrast, FIG. 21, in accordance with oneembodiment of the present invention, shows how an input of a sad facemaps to a best contextual distance for the candidate node ‘ugly:1’ whichis ugly in the sense of an undesirable toxic substance. FIGS. 19 and 20show how subtle shades of meaning recorded in the topology of a semanticnetwork guide disambiguation of polysemy, by applying best contextualdistance functions.

FIGS. 9 through 20 show how the present invention can be used fornatural language processing systems engaged in some form of dialog witha user. By repeatedly responding to a user's input while refining acontext node set, the conversational context of a dialog can be detectedand confirmed. Once a conversational context has been established, othercontextually driven meanings can be determined from the stream of anatural language input. The use of a word to refer to a preceding phraseis highly dependent upon context. The grammatical term for this isanaphora. Common examples of anaphora involve the words it and do. Forinstance in the sentence “The time has come, I know it” the it refers tothe phrase “The time has come.” In natural language processing anaphoraare difficult to map without using contextual clues. Not only key wordslike he, she, it, do demand mapping, but also his, her, its, was andeven ellipsis, where the actual anaphora's key word has been omitted. Byleaving out the ‘it’ the previous example becomes an example of ellipsiscombined with anaphora: “The time has come, I know.”

FIG. 22 shows a method for automatically disambiguating anaphora byconnecting phrases to the branch of a phrase tree having the best matchin term of a contextual distance function, in accordance with oneembodiment of the present invention. Unlike the method of FIG. 12, themethod of FIG. 22 does not involve user feedback, since it relies uponinputs and context information already established. Thus the method ofFIG. 22 can be used for text-stream parsing and automatic summarizationand translation of natural language texts.

The method of FIG. 22 can also be incorporated into a methods such asFIG. 12 to support a robust parsing of input text.

The method of FIG. 22 begins with inputs of a parsed phrase tree and ananaphora which is a subset of that phrase tree. Similarly to FIG. 11,FIG. 23, in accordance with one embodiment of the present invention,shows a small semantic network from which best contextual distances canbe measured for the method of FIG. 22. FIG. 23 contains a dictionary ofvocabulary related to ordering food in a restaurant. In step 1 a of FIG.22, as after step 1 of FIG. 12, context type and corresponding bestcontextual distance functions are identified using filtering ordispatching methods as discussed earlier for FIG. 12. In step 1 b ofFIG. 22, context node set is identified also using filtering ordispatching methods as discussed in FIG. 12, but in FIG. 22 filters ordispatches from the input phrase tree of nodes rather than an input setof nodes as in FIG. 12.

The method of FIG. 22 resolves anaphora by looking for a best possiblebranch of the parsed phrase tree to connect to the anaphora subset ofthe phrase tree. Upon resolution, the anaphora subset will be relocatedto link directly to the best possible branch of the phrase tree. Thusthe candidate node set in FIG. 22 comes from the set of nodes in theinput phrase tree to which the anaphora subset can be connected; thecandidate notes are NOT in the anaphora subset. Step 1 c identifiesthese candidate nodes.

Step 2 of FIG. 22 identifies the best candidate branch node of thephrase tree according to the optimal contextual distance function forthe context type. As in FIG. 12, the best contextual distance functionis chosen according to the table in FIG. 15. For the pronoun keywords‘his’, ‘her’ and the preposition keyword ‘and’ the best contextualdistance function is ‘minimum average distance’. In contrast, theprepositional keywords ‘not’ has the best contextual distance function‘maximum average distance.’ FIG. 22 Step 3 reconfigures the phrase treeto connect the anaphora subset to the best candidate node, thusrecording the meaning of the anaphora.

FIG. 24 shows a simple phrase tree in which all the nodes are in asingle inheritance list, in accordance with one embodiment of thepresent invention. As an input stream of natural language texts isprocessed, the structure of the input is often just a list which is thenprocessed into a more detailed tree structure reflecting grammatical andsyntactic meanings. FIG. 24 shows an example of the beginning of such aprocessing operation. Scanning for a keyword from the end of the list,the prepositional keyword ‘and’ is found. Prepositional keywords such as‘and’, ‘or’ and ‘not’ are significant because each prepositional phrasemust be properly connected to prepositional subject. Other anaphorakeywords such as ‘his’, ‘her’, ‘its’ and ‘this’ or ‘that’ may also besought when scanning for keywords. Since these connections areinfluenced by natural language context, the method of FIG. 22 is used tofind the best branch node of the phrase tree for that connection. Theanaphoric subset of FIG. 24 thus becomes the phase ‘and potatoes’ forwhich the method of FIG. 22 will find a best prepositional subject interms of a best candidate node.

FIG. 25, in accordance with one embodiment of the present invention,shows the method of FIG. 22 applied to the parse tree of FIG. 24. Instep 1 a of FIG. 25, filtering the input phrase tree subset ‘andpototoes’ produces the prepositional keyword and context type ‘and’ andthe corresponding best contextual distance function of ‘minimum averagedistance’ from the table on FIG. 13. In FIG. 25 step 1 b, filteringproduces the context node set ‘potatotes’ In step 1 c, the candidatenode set is produced from the nodes of the phrase tree which are NOT inthe anaphora subset of ‘and potatoes’. This candidate nodes of ‘She’,‘would like’, ‘salad’, ‘not’ and ‘steak’ are then measured in step 2 tofind the candidate with best average contextual distance to each node inthe context node set. In FIG. 25 there is one node in the context set,‘potatoes’. Other drawings will show how more nodes in the context nodesset affects the average best contextual distances measured. In step 3,since according to the semantic network of FIG. 23 the closestcontextual distance from potatoes to steak, the anaphora subset of ‘andpotatoes’ is connected to ‘steak’ in the parse tree.

FIG. 26, in accordance with one embodiment of the present invention,shows the parse tree of FIG. 24 after reconnecting the anaphora subsetof ‘and potatoes’ to steak. Since the preposition ‘and’ refers to bothsteak and potatoes, the keyword ‘and’ node heads the subtree to whichsteak and potatoes are connected.

FIG. 27, in accordance with one embodiment of the present invention,shows a contrasting input phrase tree in which ‘and blue cheesedressing’ is in place of ‘and potatoes’. FIG. 28, in accordance with oneembodiment of the present invention, shows the method of FIG. 22 appliedto the parse tree of FIG. 27 using the same dictionary of FIG. 23. InFIG. 29 shows, in accordance with one embodiment of the presentinvention, in step 1 b the context node set produced consists of twonodes: “blue cheese” and “dressing”. In step 3 of FIG. 29, distances tothis two node context node set is are evaluated for each of thecandidate node. Since the dictionary of FIG. 23 shows that blue cheeseand dressing are closer to salad than the other candidates, step 3connects the anaphora subset phrase “and blue cheese dressing” to“salad”. FIG. 28 shows the parse tree of FIG. 27 after step 3 of FIG. 29has reconnected “salad” and “blue cheese dressing” under the keyword“and”.

FIG. 23 shows a semantic network dictionary isolated from the parsetrees of FIGS. 24, 26, 27 and 28. Since parse trees contain valuablesemantic information, they can be stored directly in a semantic networktogether with dictionary symbol nodes. By recording how dictionarysymbol nodes are actually used in parsed trees, the meaning ofdictionary symbol nodes is more complete and up-to-date. At the sametime, the meaning of parsed tree nodes is more accurately tied to thedictionary.

FIG. 30, in accordance with one embodiment of the present invention,shows the semantic network dictionary of FIG. 23 augmented by the parsetrees of FIGS. 26 and 28. Since the parse trees of FIGS. 26 and 28 bothbegin with “She would like”, they have been automatically combined underthe header ‘She would like’ to compact their storage. The meaning of theparsed node dressing:2 inherited directly from the dictionary node‘dressing’ to record that the parser has successfully disambiguated themeaning of dressing.

By combining parse trees with a dictionary as in FIG. 30, the method ofFIG. 22 can adjust automatically to new meanings associated with parsednatural language input. The meaning of subsequent natural language inputcan be detected using meanings automatically recorded in this way.

FIG. 31, in accordance with one embodiment of the present invention,shows how meanings automatically recorded in FIG. 30 are useful whenprocessing subsequent natural language text. Using the same method stepsoutlined by FIG. 22 and using the semantic network of FIG. 30, thenatural language input text of “She would like a lot of cheese”correctly maps the meaning of cheese to cheese:2 in the dictionary ofFIG. 30. Cheese:2 is the cheese which more closely associated with saladdressing, as opposed to cheese:1 which is associated with pizza. Incontrast, FIG. 33, in accordance with one embodiment of the presentinvention, shows the same natural language input text of “She would likea lot of cheese” and same method steps outlined by FIG. 22 but using thesemantic network of FIG. 23. The meaning of cheese is correctly mappedto cheese:1 in FIG. 33 because cheese:1 of a pizza is more closelyassociated with ‘a lot of’ in the dictionaries of FIGS. 23 and 30.

As an alternative to the semantic network dictionary of FIG. 30, FIG.32, in accordance with one embodiment of the present invention, showsthe semantic network dictionary of FIG. 23 after adding parsed nodesfrom the input phrase “She would like a lot of cheese.” FIG. 32 showshow differently the meaning of the parsed nodes She:2 and ‘would like:2’are recorded when the input “She would like a lot of cheese” precedes“She would like salad not steak and potatoes.” As parsed nodesaccumulate in a semantic network dictionary, the present invention usesthem to more accurately attribute meanings to subsequent naturallanguage input. However, if too many parsed nodes accumulate, theirtopology needs to be compacted. General methods for compacting them areoutlined in patent application Ser. No. 09/085,830. Specific methods forcompacting parsed nodes are outlined in drawing FIGS. 43 through 60 inthe present invention.

Examples using the method of FIG. 22 to disambiguate the meaning ofpronoun anaphora are shown in FIG. 34 through 38, in accordance with oneembodiment of the present invention. In FIG. 34, a small semanticnetwork dictionary is shown. FIG. 35 shows an input parse tree in theform of a list, in which the anaphora pronoun keyword ‘her’ has beenmarked to delimit the start of an anaphora subset phrase of ‘her food’.The other delimiter is the verb ‘was’ which marks the end of theanaphora subset phrase. FIG. 36 shows how the steps of FIG. 22 can beused with the dictionary of FIG. 34 to map the anaphora subset of ‘herfood’ to best branch node of FIG. 35. Since the name ‘Amy’ is closer to‘her’ in the dictionary than the other candidates of ‘should be’,‘here’, ‘.’, ‘Harold’, ‘said’, ‘was’ and ‘ready’, step 3 reconnects‘her’ and ‘food’ to ‘Amy’.

In contrast, FIG. 37 shows an input parse tree in the form of a list, inwhich the anaphora pronoun keyword ‘his’ has been marked to delimit thestart of an anaphora subset of ‘his food’. The other delimiter is theverb ‘was’ which marks the end of the anaphora subset phrase. FIG. 38shows the steps of the method in FIG. 22 used with the dictionary ofFIG. 34 and the input phrase tree of FIG. 37. Since the name ‘Harold’ iscloser to ‘his’ in the dictionary than the other candidates of ‘Amy’,‘should be’, ‘her’, ‘.’, ‘Harold’, ‘said’, ‘was’ and ‘ready’, FIG. 38step 3 reconnects ‘his’ and ‘food’ to ‘Harold’.

FIG. 39, in accordance with one embodiment of the present invention,shows a small semantic network dictionary emphasizing how long chains ofcategorization hierarchy links can classify various meanings for thesymbol ‘Chicago’. FIG. 40, in accordance with one embodiment of thepresent invention shows a variation of the method of FIG. 12, amended tocategorize nodes by spelling and by a complex traversal function, todisambiguate the meaning of the phrase “Chicago bigger than a breadbox?”

Step 2 of FIG. 40 describes the complex traversal function, whichtravels long chains of categorization hierarchy links to retrieve a setof candidate nodes. These candidate nodes are compared using a bestcontextual distance function as in FIG. 12. FIG. 41, in accordance withone embodiment of the present invention is an example of how the methodof FIG. 40 can be used to map candidates of Chicago:1, Chicago:2 andChicago:3 to a context node set of “bread box”, correctly identifyingChicago:2 as the best meaning of Chicago in “Chicago bigger than breadbox.”

As shown earlier, in FIG. 30, a semantic network dictionary combinedfrom dictionary node symbols and parsed natural language node symbolscan be used to automatically add parsed semantic information to a largesemantic dictionary. When a large number of parsed natural languagenodes is added to a dictionary, the topology of the dictionary growsirregular and often repeats the same parse tree fragments. To compactthe dictionary, FIG. 43, in accordance with one embodiment of thepresent invention, shows a method to convert parsed node subtrees tocorresponding is-a link dictionary nodes. In accordance with oneembodiment of the present invention, Is-a links are standardclassification hierarchy links, shown as narrow black lines in FIG. 44,as opposed to the more vague ‘informs’ links shown as wide gray lines inFIG. 44. In step 1 of FIG. 43, parse trees marked for compaction aredetected by their inheritance link to the key node ‘inversion’ (shown inbold). In step 2 of FIG. 43, the subjects of these parse tree aremarked, and semantic links to the subjects are reconfigured to inheritfrom the predicate via direct is-a link. Since the parse tree has nowbeen recorded as a standard dictionary node, step 3 of FIG. 43 deletesthe redundant nodes from the parse tree to compact the semantic network.Step 3 then returns to steps 1 as a loop, to automatically compact otherparse trees.

FIG. 42, in accordance with one embodiment of the present inventionshows an example of a series of natural language inputs to be recordedby a semantic network by methods of FIG. 22 and FIG. 43. FIG. 44, inaccordance with one embodiment of the present invention, shows a smallsemantic network dictionary for use by methods of FIGS. 22 and 43 torecord the inputs shown in FIG. 42. FIG. 45 shows the input sentence “Myfriend Hal was a programmer” recorded into the semantic network of FIG.44 by method of FIG. 22. The node was:3 is shown in bold to indicatethat it inherits from ‘inversion’ and therefore will be detected by themethod of FIG. 43 for inversion to dictionary format.

FIG. 46, in accordance with one embodiment of the present invention,shows how the subtree of was:3 is inverted to dictionary format nodeprogrammer:2 inheriting from was:1 and programmer:1. Since step 1 alsolinks Hal:2 to inherit from programmer:2, the subtree of was:3 has nowbeen fully inverted to dictionary format. Hal:2 now inherits the meaningof programmer:2 directly from an is-a link, exactly as a standarddictionary node instead of a parse tree node. In FIG. 47, in accordancewith one embodiment of the present invention, the redundant subtreenodes was:3, a:4 and programmer:3 nodes are deleted, to compact thesemantic network.

The next two lines of input from FIG. 42 are recorded by the method ofFIG. 22 to augment the semantic network of FIG. 47. These inputs are“His number is (402) 287-0101. His address is 404 Fesser Street inDetroit.” This augmented semantic network is shown in FIG. 48, inaccordance with one embodiment of the present invention. Since numberand address as predicate concepts are not intrinsic to their subjects,the is:1 node associated with number:1 and address:1 are do not inheritfrom ‘inversion’. This prevents the method of FIG. 43 from improperlyinverting parse node subtrees which inherit from is:1. Since is:1 iscloser in the semantic network to number:1 and address:1, the method ofFIG. 22 connects the parse node is:4 to is:1 rather than is:2.

FIG. 49, in accordance with one embodiment of the present invention,shows the semantic network of FIG. 48 after applying the method of FIG.22 on the fourth input line of FIG. 42: “He is a good trumpet player.”Since is:2 is closer to player:1 than is:1 in FIG. 48, the method ofFIG. 22 connects the parse node is:5 to is:2 rather than is:1. Thispermits the method of FIG. 43 to correctly invert the parse node subtreeis:5 to standard dictionary node is-a links, shown in FIG. 50.

FIG. 43 through 50, in accordance with one embodiment of the presentinvention thus show how semantic information can be automatically parsedinto standard semantic network dictionary format, to automaticallycreate large semantic network dictionaries without manual interventionby lexicographers and linguists. These labor-saving methods can beextended to also automatically record semantic information containedquestions posed to a natural language processor. FIG. 51 through 60, inaccordance with one embodiment of the present invention, show how parsedquestions can be stored in a semantic network dictionary just as parsedstatements can be stored. The parsed questions can be marked for laterlinking to their answers, as shown in FIG. 59, and entirequestion-answer parsed subtrees can be inverted to standard dictionaryis-a link nodes as shown in FIG. 60. The method shown in FIG. 58 showshow to invert questions into is-a links. FIG. 51 shows how to generatean answer to a question, by describing nodes which best in the sense ofa best contextual distance to the question nodes. FIG. 52 shows how tomap question node types to traversal functions to fetch candidate nodesfor answering questions. A set of candidate nodes having best contextualdistance to the question nodes can then be chosen as an answer toquestions.

FIG. 53 shows how the method of FIG. 51 answers the question from FIG.42 by creating nodes in the semantic network of FIG. 50. Since thepresent invention automatically acquires semantic network meanings fromnatural language statements, questions and answers to questions, thepresent invention can automatically acquire all type of natural languagemeanings from natural language dialog. This automatic languageacquisition functionality, together with the accuracy of the retrievalmethods of the present invention makes the comparatively laborious database maintenance work of relational database obsolete.

1-19. (canceled)
 20. A method of providing customer support usingnatural language input, the method comprising: receiving a naturallanguage search input, wherein the natural language input includes atleast one word; analyzing each of the at least one word of the naturallanguage input using a semantic inheritance network; and determining acontextual meaning for the natural language input using each of the atleast one word of the natural language input analyzed using the semanticinheritance network.
 21. The method of claim 20, wherein analyzing eachof the at least one word of the natural language input using a semanticinheritance network includes: analyzing each of the at least one word ofthe natural language input using a plurality of candidate nodes and atleast one contextual distance; and determining at least one preferredcontextual distance.
 22. The method of claim 21, wherein determining acontextual meaning for the natural language input using each of the atleast one word of the natural language input analyzed using the semanticinheritance network includes: applying the at least one contextualdistance to the plurality of candidate nodes to produce a contextualmeaning for the natural language input.
 23. The method of claim 22,wherein the semantic inheritance network includes a stored naturallanguage context including a plurality of context nodes, and whereinanalyzing each of the at least one word of the natural language inputusing a plurality of candidate nodes and at least one contextualdistance includes: identifying a plurality of links, wherein each of theplurality of links traverses from one of the plurality of candidatenodes to one of the plurality of context nodes; and computing each ofthe at least one contextual distance for each of the plurality ofcandidate nodes, each of the at least one contextual distance occurringbetween one of the plurality of candidate nodes and one of the pluralityof context nodes.
 24. The method of claim 23, wherein determining atleast one preferred contextual distance includes: comparing each of theat least one contextual distance to one another.
 25. The method of claim24, wherein determining at least one preferred contextual distancefurther includes: selecting a subset of candidate nodes from theplurality of candidate nodes.
 26. The method of claim 25, whereindetermining at least one preferred contextual distance further includes:determining a preferred contextual meaning corresponding to the naturallanguage input; wherein each of the subset of candidate nodes has anassociated contextual distance approximating an optimal contextualdistance, such that each of the input nodes has at least one candidatenode selected from the subset of candidate nodes, the at least oneassociated candidate node being the preferred contextual meaning for thecorresponding one from the set of input nodes.
 27. The method of claim26, wherein the semantic inheritance network includes a plurality ofsemantic nodes, and wherein each of the subset of candidate nodesinherits from a common semantic network node, the common semanticnetwork node being selected from the plurality of semantic nodes. 28.The method of claim 26, wherein determining at least one preferredcontextual distance further includes: determining a greatest minimaldistance among each of the plurality of candidate nodes and each of theplurality of context nodes.
 29. The method of claim 26, wherein, if nolinks are identified as traversing among one of the plurality ofcandidate nodes and any one of the plurality of context nodes,estimating a distance between each of the plurality of candidate nodesand each of the plurality of context nodes.
 30. The method of claim 26,wherein each of the plurality of links has a corresponding one of aplurality of semantic link types.
 31. The method of claim 26, wherein nolinks are identified as traversing from one of the plurality ofcandidate nodes to one from the plurality of context nodes for at leastone of the plurality of semantic link types.
 32. The method of claim 26,wherein identifying a plurality of links includes: excluding each of theplurality of links having the at least one of the plurality of semanticlink types for which no links are identified.
 33. The method of claim20, wherein the network is the Internet.
 34. The method of claim 20,wherein the method is performed by a processor.
 35. The method of claim34, wherein the processor is contained in a terminal.
 36. The method ofclaim 35, wherein the terminal is selected from a group consisting of apersonal computer, a minicomputer, a microcomputer, a main framecomputer, a telephone device, and a hand-held device.
 37. The method ofclaim 34, wherein the processor is imbedded in a device having voicesynthesis capability.
 38. The method of claim 22, wherein the pluralityof candidate nodes have inheritance sibling nodes and links among theinheritance sibling nodes in a topology, the method further comprising:applying an abstractness analysis to the topology for each of thecandidate nodes and to at least one alternative topology for each of thecandidate nodes; and selecting at least one preferred topology based onthe abstractness analysis.
 39. The method of claim 38, wherein selectingat least one preferred topology based on the abstractness analysisincludes: weighting the topology and each of the at least onealternative topology.
 40. The method of claim 22, further comprising:identifying a customer support query most closely corresponding to thesubset of the plurality of possible words having the contextual meaningmeeting the preferred contextual meaning threshold.
 41. The method ofclaim 40, further comprising: providing a customer support functioncorresponding to the identified customer support query.
 42. The methodof claim 41, wherein the customer support function is a text or soundresponse to the customer support query.
 43. The method of claim 42,wherein the sound response includes voice information.